The next oddity is that he left his job in Japan in September 2010 and visited India for a week, ostensibly to attend a four-day course on ethical hacking.[77] India is far friendlier territory for Russian spies wanting to talk to a source than somewhere like Japan or Switzerland. There is no proof that this happened. But the trip does not quite make sense. Anyone with a security clearance would normally have to seek permission to attend such a course; it would be unlikely to be granted. It may be that procedures for dealing with contractors at the base in Japan were sloppy: in 2011 a background check on Snowden was improperly carried out.[78] At any rate, he did not declare this trip to his employers before or afterwards. If he was indeed learning hacking skills, it would be interesting to know why: the course was not needed for his job. If he went to India to meet someone, that would be interesting too. Either way, the trip looks fishy.
Snowden moved to Hawaii, and in March 2013 took a job at an NSA contractor, Booz Allen Hamilton. His new employer was worried by his resumé. It seemed to have been padded with educational accomplishments which would have been better described as aspirations.[79] He was a systems administrator, one of the unsung people who keep machines and software working properly. The job has its drawbacks—but its boringness makes mischief possible. Supervising people who are doing boring jobs is itself boring, and is often done badly. But before gaining this job, Snowden was already stealing secrets (at least as early as April 2012, American officials believe[80]). He says he sought the Booz Allen job because it ‘granted me access to lists of machines all over the world the NSA hacked’.[81] He seems to have persuaded between 20 and 25 of his NSA colleagues to give him their passwords and log-ins. If true—he has denied it—this is striking. It is the behaviour of a spy, not a whistleblower. Why would someone who wanted the best for his country, and reform of his agency, entrap colleagues into a career-ruining blunder? (The people concerned have now, it seems, been dismissed.)
For Russian intelligence, sparking an association between the disgruntled Snowden and eager recipients of state secrets such as Glenn Greenwald the blogger, Jacob Appelbaum the hacker, Laura Poitras the film-maker, and others in that world of hacktivists and transparency campaigners would be a logical next step. All were associated to varying degrees with WikiLeaks, which, as I have shown above, was of great use to Russia (indeed its fugitive founder, Julian Assange, now has a show on the RT state propaganda television station).[82] The hacker milieu is full of Westerners who are highly suspicious of their own governments for tampering with what they regard as the inviolable autonomy of the internet from any legal constraints. The KGB certainly found it a fertile hunting ground in the 1980s, using German hackers to steal NATO secrets in the days when online security was still rudimentary.[83]
Such links and opportunities do not prove that any of the above-mentioned people are conscious agents of the Russian state, and I am not accusing them of that. (Snowden himself says the idea is ‘absurd’.) But they do not need to be. The example of the peace movement shows that given the right initial direction and a favourable propaganda environment, political movements in the West can serve the Kremlin’s purpose without hands-on control. It would not be hard for Russian intelligence to conceal an intelligence officer or agent of influence somewhere in the background, or for that person to broker an introduction between Snowden and his future allies.
The skimpy and confusing public accounts given so far leave plenty of room for such suspicion. One question is when Snowden first started to steal secrets. He joined Booz Allen Hamilton in March, but well before that he had offered secret files to Poitras and Greenwald. Where did he get them and when? A related puzzle is when Snowden first made contact with his future allies. As the blogger Catherine A Fitzpatrick has noted, there are no fewer than five dates given for his first contact with Greenwald.[84] It does not seem completely plausible that Snowden’s first contact came only when he started sending e-mails to Poitras in January 2013. Ostensibly, she then persuaded Greenwald to install encryption software and take the mysterious anonymous would-be source seriously (Greenwald had ignored previous e-mails from Snowden, thinking he was a crank).[85] But Appelbaum was in Hawaii in March 2013 for a hacker conference, the SBoC (Spring Break of Code). A bunch of other dedicated activists attended too, including Christine Corbett, the pseudonymous hacker Moxie Marlinspike, and others. An American academic and blogger, Craig Pirrong, conjectures that what really happened was this:
Snowden was in contact with Appelbaum first, and well before January 2013, and Appelbaum directed Snowden to Poitras. It would be natural for a computer geek and hacker like Snowden to know of, and to reach out to, Appelbaum. Far more natural than to reach out to Poitras first. Under this conjecture, the timing works out. Snowden, Appelbaum, and Moxie work out their basic plan in late 2012 or early January 2013. Appelbaum activates the plan to disseminate the information via Poitras by putting Snowden in touch with her and near simultaneously Moxie initiates the SBoC to give him cover to travel to Hawaii (and perhaps too a team of unwitting accomplices that could help him cover his activities while there). They all converge in Hawaii a couple of months later.[86]
The timing of Snowden’s activities in Hawaii gives some support to that theory. Lindsey Mills, his girlfriend of five years (but now abandoned), has deleted her blog. But it is available on the internet archive via the Wayback Machine.[87] With some acute observation, Fitzpatrick notes that Mills refers to her boyfriend disappearing off on a two-week trip on April 1st (Appelbaum’s birthday is on or near April 3rd) and that she grumbles mildly about having to be a taxi-driver to a lot of people—Appelbaum’s birthday guests, perhaps.[88] (Ms Mills did not reply to an e-mail seeking comment.)
Another puzzle is about Snowden’s arrival in Hong Kong. According to the account given, he told Poitras and Greenwald to wait outside a particular restaurant at a particular time, until they saw a man carrying a Rubik’s cube. They were to ask him when the restaurant would open and he would reply that the food was bad. That sounds sensible. Snowden would know what Greenwald and Poitras looked like but they would need to know they were dealing with the right source, not a plant or decoy. The Rubik’s cube may have been signalled in a mysterious and possibly coded tweet by Christine Corbett, a hacker friend of Appelbaum’s, about a ‘Rubik’s Cube party’.[89]
The next puzzle concerns Snowden’s travels after he disappeared from work, telling his employers that he needed treatment for epilepsy. If he were truly keen to portray himself as a whistleblower, why did he fly to Hong Kong? For anyone involved in American cyber-security, China is the biggest threat—bigger even than Russia. Though autonomous in economic terms, Hong Kong is firmly under the thumb of the Chinese authorities when it comes to security. Assuming he was not in a hurry, he could have flown anywhere he liked. Heading into Chinese jurisdiction—and promptly leaking details of NSA operations against China to the South China Morning Post—looks either like a deliberate snub to his former employers, or an act of boat-burning desperation, or perhaps a quid pro quo to some other party. One report in a Russian newspaper (denied by Snowden’s American lawyer) says that once in Hong Kong, he celebrated his 30th birthday at the Russian consulate, spending two days there in all—mystifying behaviour for someone with his professed ideals and motivation.[90]
77
79
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/21/us-usa-security-snowden-idUSBRE95K01J20130621
80
http://in.reuters.com/article/2013/08/15/usa-security-snowden-dell-idINDEE97E0CE20130815
81
82
An excellent account of the muddled and extremist views of Assange, Greenwald and Snowden can be found at http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116253/edward-snowden-glenn-greenwald-julian-assange-what-they-believe
83
This is described in the 1989 classic
85
A long and friendly account of the story, based on Greenwald and Poitras’s account, can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/magazine/laura-poitras-snowden.html?pagewanted=6&_r=0&pagewanted=all
88
89
This theory is elaborated by Fitzpatrick at http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2013/11/the-crypto-kids-and-the-rubiks-party-signal-to-snowden.html
90
http://www.kommersant.ru/doc/2263705 (in Russian). See also Fitzpatrick’s analysis at http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2013/08/edward-snowden-partied-with-the-russians-in-hong-kong-on-his-30th-birthday.html